by Alex Marwood
She stretches her aching back and catches sight of her expression – the face she used to pull when dosed with cod liver oil from a teaspoon as a child – in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She’s been seeing her face in this carved wood frame for the whole of her life. Still feels a sense of profound shock every time she glances into it and sees an almost-seventy-year-old woman staring back. Where did it all go? Did I really do so little, that I’m still living here, surrounded by reminders of my parents’ tenancy before me – the Waterford vase, Mum’s collection of ceramic cottages, the framed photos of long-dead ancestors on the tallboy, The Crying Boy in his frame on the wall, Nan’s good teaset behind the glass of the display cabinet – with hardly a mark of my own life added on top?
Her own death looms large in her mind these days. She looks around her living room, and suddenly sees it through the contemptuous eyes of the outsider who has treated it with such gleeful disrespect. She’s made the occasional attempt to stamp her own personality on the place, with the frugal resources of a spinster dinner lady. The upright suite with its lace-edged antimacassars has been replaced by a flower-pattern settee and a tub armchair, her mother’s fussy wallpaper painted over in neutral colours, but most of the things this stranger has destroyed come from a time before she was even thought of – the plates, glasses, books, pictures, the occasional table, the Coronation plate that used to hang on the wall and the Murano bird brought back by her dad after the war ended. Even my bits of jewellery that came from Mum, she thinks. And when I go, what will I leave behind? And who, anyway, is there to leave it to?
Vesta has lived her whole life in this cave beneath Beulah Grove, in the basement half-light, never knowing what the weather was like without opening the back door. She has seen the neighbourhood go from genteel lower-middle to Irish-rough to Caribbean poor and, over recent years, swing gradually into the hands of people who sound like they should be running a village fete. She was born here, in what is now her bedroom, and is beginning to suspect that she might die here, too. Grew up in her own little nook, walled off by her father in plyboard and woodchip, in a corner of the lounge, has eaten nearly every meal of her life at the little gateleg table by the back wall, nursed her elderly parents as, one by one, time took them, and took over the tenancy when her mother died, in 1971, back in the days when tenants still had rights. She’s seen off three landlords and, from the look of this one lately, might well see off a fourth. But Londoners are meant to be adventurers, she thinks. You’re not meant to come from here. You’re meant to come to here.
I’m luckier than some people, she thinks. A secure tenancy is a secure tenancy. At least I won’t end my life out on the street. But oh, what happened to my life?
She doesn’t know what, if anything, her invader was looking for. The tea caddy where she keeps the scratched savings of a life lived frugally on the old-age pension hasn’t been raided, and her mother’s engagement and wedding rings, the eternity ring with which her father marked her own belated birth, still nestle in their felt-lined boxes on the bedroom mantelpiece. Her electrical equipment is outdated and chunky, but a junkie would probably have got a tenner for the telly. It’s spite, she thinks. Pure spite. He just broke in to spoil my home. Why else would you upturn a funeral urn and tread the ashes into the carpet?
Holding on to the table, Vesta lowers herself to the ground and starts to sweep together the contents of her memory box, tipped out randomly among her parents’ cremains. She hates herself for having fallen prey to such indecisiveness about what to do with them. They only hold a space for so long at the crematorium and after that, you’re on your own. For forty years, she’s meant to take them to some beauty spot, some place with a view, and scatter them there, but every time she’s tried to remember a place they might have loved, her mind has gone blank. They didn’t do much. Her mother’s whole world encompassed errands on the High Street and the occasional walk on the common, a trip to the shops in Kingston a major undertaking. They never even went into town, as far as she remembers. For all the use they made of London – big, scary, exciting London – they might as well have lived in Cardiff. No wonder I’ve never done anything myself, she thinks. It’s over a decade since I last went in to Oxford Street, even.
Such a paltry little box of keepsakes; nothing of value, nothing that will mean anything to anyone else. When I die all alone in a hospice, she thinks, they’ll send in the house clearers, and the whole lot will go in a skip. Oh, stop it, Vesta, she scolds herself. Pull yourself together. The world is full of nice people. You can’t let one spite-filled random act of vandalism ruin it for you. Such kindness I’ve seen over the past couple of days. I have to remember that, hold on to that. There’s more kindness than nastiness in the world.
From above, she can hear Gerard Bright’s music thunder through the floorboards. Normally she tunes it out, adopts a live-and-let-live approach, but he seems to have been playing The Ride of the Valkyries since breakfast time, and the sound of the new girl in the back room, walking up and down, up and down, has driven her out of the bedroom. She goes over to the window, where there is light, and leafs through her handful of photos – relatives long since dead, friends and neighbours moved on, moved up, returned to their countries of origin – and feels a surge of loneliness. I was always good at making friends, she thinks. But I haven’t the first idea where they all are, now. That’s London, for you. There’s more of a sense of community than outsiders give us credit for, but the communities don’t last.
She hears footsteps rattle up the pavement, and glances up at the window. The little girl from the first floor, Cher, walks past, all legs and backpack from this angle. She’s wearing that wig again, hiding her lovely hair as if she’s ashamed of it, and is dressed as if she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. She goes out a couple of times a week like that, and the sight makes Vesta melancholy. Enjoy it, my love, she wills the girl. You have no idea how much you’ll miss those looks when they’re gone.
Cher peers down and sees her, and waves airily down from on high. Such a pretty face. Vesta feels herself touched by sunshine, smiles broadly, and waves back. Lovely girl. A bit lost, she senses, a bit aimless, as if she’s waiting for someone to point her where to go. And so young. She barely looks old enough to have left school. Mind you, I long since lost my knack for telling how old people are, she thinks. Policemen have been looking young to me for decades. Maybe it’s just one of those things about being nearly seventy that everyone under thirty looks as if they’re barely out of nappies.
She slides the window open. ‘Hello, love.’
‘Hiya,’ says Cher. ‘How’s the clearing up going?’
‘Oh, you know,’ says Vesta. ‘Where are you coming back from?’
‘College,’ says Cher. They both know it isn’t true, but it’s their unspoken agreement that Vesta won’t say anything if Cher at least looks as if she’s trying to improve herself.
‘You’re back early,’ says Vesta. From the state of her reading Vesta guesses that Cher’s still not enrolled anywhere as she’d suggested. I must do something about that, she thinks. Maybe I could teach her myself? Because it’s not stupidity that’s stopping her.
‘Short day,’ says Cher. ‘It’s so bloody hot it’s hard to concentrate.’
‘I bet. You got time for a cuppa?’
Cher mimes checking the watch she doesn’t wear. ‘Sure.’
‘Back door’s open. Come on down.’
She potters through to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Pulls a face at the smell coming in through the open door. She’s got to catch the Landlord about those drains, again. Her kitchen sink is taking the best part of an hour to empty, cooling greasily an inch below the overflow. Five pounds a week she’s been spending on chemicals to keep the outlet moving, but the drains barely seem to work at all, now. That bottle of something he poured down the outside drain before she left has done no good at all. Probably just a gallon of bleach from Poundstretcher, anyway. He’ll never spend money if he
has a choice about it.
The gate in the side-return creaks, and Cher appears at the top of the steps, picking her way delicately between the plant pots. Psycho the cat trots complaisantly in her wake. He must have been waiting somewhere in the shade for her to come home. He’s really attached himself to her, thinks Vesta. That’s nice. It’s nice to think he’s found himself a good friend. She would love to have him herself, but the Landlord would use it as an excuse to break her lease before he’d got through his first tin of Whiskas. Cher has shed her wig, and dangles it from one hand like a Regency lady holding a fan. Her hair is tied up on the back of her head, her neck exposed to let out the sweat.
‘It’s a stinker out there,’ she says, and starts down the chipped brick steps. Catches the whiff of the drains and pulls a face. ‘Feee-you,’ she says, and waves the wig in front of her face as though that will make the smell go away. She’s such a kid, thinks Vesta, again. It’s so bizarre, the way teenagers are: twenty-five one second and seven the next. ‘That’s a bit rank, isn’t it?’
‘It’s the drains,’ says Vesta. ‘They’re blocked again.’
‘He needs to call Dyno-Rod, that mean old bastard.’
‘I keep telling him. It’s all those kitchenettes. Emptying their bacon fat down their plugholes.’
Cher shakes her head. ‘Not me.’
‘Yes, well, that’s because you live on pizza and chocolate. These drains were built for a family house, not a block of flats, and he needs to deal with it. Someone’s going to go down with food poisoning, and it’ll probably be me. Milk and two, is it, love?’
Cher bounces down the last two steps, tittups over to her door. ‘Ta.’
‘Let’s have it in the garden,’ says Vesta. ‘Get away from the smell.’
She hands Cher her cup and follows her up into the sunshine, passing through her potted herb garden. Sweet aromas of sage and rosemary, basil and mint rise off the heated bushes as they brush past. Now, this is what a garden should smell like, she thinks. Feels a little swell of pleasure at the patch of civilisation she’s carved out of the dilapidation beyond.
It’s a big garden, bigger than normal for London, the railway tracks at its end having saved it from being carved up for development. Vesta has kept the front third tidied and cultivated all her life. It was her contribution to the family when she was a child, bringing flavour and colour to her mother’s sepia household, and the green-finger bug has stayed with her ever since. Narrow beds of bright annuals, fetched back, one by one, from the greengrocer’s discount shelf, surround a tablecloth of manicured lawn on which two old-fashioned deckchairs recline in the dazzle. Beyond the beds, a tangle of foot-long grass, run to seed so often it’s almost a hayfield, a blind rhododendron that contrives to look dank even in this weather, a couple of aged plum trees, stunted by some bug that’s way beyond Vesta’s knowledge, a mess of rubble and bonfire ash and goosegrass surrounding a tumbledown shed.
‘Looks lovely out here,’ says Cher.
‘Thanks,’ says Vesta, and they sit in the deckchairs with their back to the chaos. Each takes their first sip of tea and lets out the great British ‘ahhhh’ as they settle back. The generations may look completely different, thinks Vesta, but some things never change. The cat finds a patch of sun and rolls on to his back to show the handkerchief of white on his belly. She smiles.
‘You look more cheerful,’ says Cher. ‘You almost done in there?’
‘Not completely. But at least I can sit down, now.’
‘Christ. They really made a mess, didn’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ooh, that reminds me.’ Cher leans over her backpack and rummages inside. ‘I got you a present.’ She finds what she’s looking for, and holds it out, a small hard object wrapped in a T-shirt. She looks pleased with herself. ‘I hope you like it.’
‘Oh, Cher, you shouldn’t waste your money on buying me…’ begins Vesta, then stops dead when she sees what’s inside the bundle. It’s a dancing lady, bone china, imperial purple ball dress swirling around impossibly thin ankles, a blaze of carmine hair improbably stiff on a single shoulder. Round azure eyes and a snub nose, tiny mouth hand-painted in shiny crimson. It’s the spit of one of her mother’s that lies in pieces with the rest of the collection, wrapped in newspaper in her kitchen bin. ‘Oh, Cher,’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t have. What on earth did you think you were doing? You can’t afford this.’
Cher shrugs. ‘Didn’t cost much. Hardly anything.’
‘No, but…’ Vesta knows exactly how much they cost. She and Cher looked at them together only a few weeks ago, in the window of Bentalls in Kingston, and she was shocked to see that they cost very nearly a week’s old-age pension. All these years, she had had no idea. Her burglar has taken out very nearly a thousand pounds she never knew she had with a single swing of the poker from the fireplace. ‘… I can’t believe you’ve done this.’
Cher’s face clouds over. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘It’s not that. It’s… Cher, you shouldn’t have done this. You should save your money. You shouldn’t be spending it on things like this. What about your rent?’
She looks up and sees that Cher has visibly shrunk. She swings her legs from the knees like a little kid, wide-eyed with disappointment. ‘I thought you’d like it,’ she says. ‘I can get you something else, if you want.’
‘No, love,’ says Vesta. ‘I love it. I love, love, love it. C’m’ere.’
She holds her arms out and enfolds Cher in a hug. They’re both so thin it’s not a very comfortable hug; more a clashing of bones. Cher smells of salt and hair conditioner, and some floral chemical they all spray over themselves these days. She hugs like someone who’s not used to hugging: comes into it gingerly, as though she’s nervous that something will break, and then clings on far too long, as though she’s afraid to let go. They stay there, awkwardly, in the sunshine, for longer than either of them is easy with. Poor little love, thinks Vesta. Whoever dragged her up, they didn’t make her expect people to like her.
Slowly, slowly, she disentangles herself, and lays the figurine gently down on the grass. ‘It’ll look lovely on the mantelpiece,’ she assures her. ‘I shall treasure it for ever.’
But where the hell is Cher affording this sort of thing? she wonders. It’s not off the dole, that’s for sure. And how do you ask someone if they’ve stolen your present, without offending them? Cher is always popping in with stuff: usually biscuits, or a cake or something. But always premium quality, branded stuff. No Every Little Helps about young Cheryl’s presents. But oh, I would feel terrible if she got caught nicking nonsense to lay at my feet the way that cat brings her mice.
‘What’s the new tenant like?’ she asks, changing the subject because she knows that if she stays on it she’ll have to ask. ‘Have you met her yet?’
Cher plops back down into her deckchair. ‘Ooh, yeah,’ she says. ‘I dropped in, the other night.’
‘Oh, you,’ says Vesta. ‘You’ve got no shame, have you?’
Cher shrugs. ‘It’s not Buckingham Palace. You don’t need a tiara and a fanfare. Anyway, I took a bottle of Baileys.’
There she goes again, thinks Vesta. She’s partial to a drop of the creamy stuff herself, but she doesn’t even buy Baileys at Christmas.
‘She’s all right,’ says Cher. ‘Posh. Talks like someone off Made in Chelsea. God knows what she’s doing here.’
‘Divorce?’
Cher shakes her head. ‘She’s been travelling, that’s what she said. Lucky for some. I haven’t even got a passport.’
Vesta laughs. ‘I have. Every ten years, I renew it. Always think I might, you know, go somewhere some day.’
‘Anyway, her mum’s in a maximum security Twilight Home. I think she’s on her way out and she said something about wanting to be near her, in case.’
‘In case. I’ve always liked that phrase. You can cover a lot of ground with an “in case”. Shall I ask her down, you think? Would that be nice?�
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Cher shrugs. ‘Could do.’
Vesta closes her eyes and listens for a moment to the neighbourhood noise: the laughter of the kids from what they call the Posh Family on the other side of the fence playing in their paddling pool, the tannoy playing a recorded announcement on the unmanned station platform, a jet changing speed as it cruises in towards Heathrow. You would only have heard one of those sounds when I was Cher’s age, she thinks. ‘I wonder,’ she says. ‘Maybe I ought to throw a party?’
‘A party?’
‘Not a huge party. Just us. Well, it’s silly, isn’t it? All of us living on top of each other, and we’ve never all been in the same place at the same time. And it would be nice. A thank you because you’ve all been so nice, about the burglary. You and Hossein. Even Thomas. And it would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Welcome her to the house; thank everyone. And get him in Flat One to leave his lair. He’s been here ages and we’ve barely said a word. And besides. It’s been ages since I had a party.’
‘How long?’
‘God, it must be…’ Her mind flashes back to Erroll Grey and the Khans, sitting on her mother’s old settee. Really? She’s not had a party since that went on a skip? ‘Good Lord. Seven years, at least. I can’t believe it. I used to have people down all the time. And I’ve still got Mum’s old teaset. I spend my life washing the damn thing up, and it never gets used. Might as well celebrate the fact that at least he didn’t smash that, eh?’